Businesses that offer services to large numbers of people often have access to large amounts of sensitive information. For example, many businesses perform thousands or millions of credit card transactions each year. Credit card information is just one example of sensitive information that many companies handle as part of providing a service.
Currently existing methods for protecting large amounts of sensitive information have disadvantages. Typically, when the information includes millions of records, the method of protection includes applying a quick and single step transformation to each piece of information. This allows the information to be quickly transformed into a secure state and allows for quickly returning the transformed data to its original state. The disadvantage of this method is that the single step transformation is not secure. With the development of more powerful computing systems and increasing market for illegal sales of sensitive information, there is opportunity and reward for people who can breach existing security measures and get access to businesses sensitive information.
It is important for businesses to be able to protect large amounts of sensitive information such as credit card information while still being able to access the information when needed.